I do think you will see situations where customers will work from home *many or most days* but may come into the office for in-person meetings (both internal and external).

I know about some companies introducing combination of working in the office and working from home as their long-term plan. The idea is to cut office lease costs, while also maintaining proper social contact within the company or individual teams.

It certainly feels like a fundamental change in the United States. But I disagree completely for many other countries. In many countries there is a superficial and unsustainable temporary change. But not a fundamental change. The US business culture is quite a bit different from most other countries.

For the past few years I would travel weekly or bi-weekly to work face to face either at my company or with my clients. I think the Pandemic has reset what people think was essential and what was a luxury or nice to have for business. I also talk to a lot of people who don't travel and find my observations similar.

1) A large portion of your job that you thought could do face to face or onsite, surprise you can actually be very effective collaborating from home.
2) At my current company some with direct work of course have go onsite, but the majority are actually getting to 90% effectiveness or better remote.

I know my direct travel was 60-90K/year and I don't get to travel and stay with premium perks, but I am sure the CFO is looking and saying hey there is a lot of savings here.

There are some things that always need travel, but this whole thing will put a steak and end a lot of things and the airplanes and hotels will need to make a huge adjustment.

I've now gone > 150 days remote and hit every milestone.

What I see is following - people who say that corporate travel will come back are those who miss it and have feelings attached to it.

From objective/business perspective, if after 6 months a revenue for a businesses is nnnn $, and if that nnnn is the same as in pre-pandemic times, why any CFO/CEO in their clear mind wants to start spending yyy $ on travel without a clear evidence that additional return from that $ yyy will be 2x or more of the amount spent?

People who think that businesses will go back flying people TATL/TPAC to do 1-2 day meetings, need to do serious reality check.

I miss it ;)

It is worth having a look at the front page of that much respected journal the Daily Mail today. Also the Telegraph. This is also being discussed in the UK 14 thread in this forum, with speculation from c-w-s that something will happen in the next 2 weeks for the UK.

I have worked in a role where global operations were managed on a daily and weekly basis remotely by VC and call, going back 15 years+. Jumping on a plane was never the default, and certainly not “just for a meeting”. For a week long trip covering a tonne of ground from strategic reviews, site walk throughs, audits, new suppliers and providers, yes.

I guess it might be different from a US Domestic perspective though. And also by sector too. Those with an intangible product like finance and IT have far less need to move v those dealing with physical stuff and things.

My travel made my job easier and the teams work easier. The removal of travel has made things harder and slower at ground level. The savings are immense (100s of millions, cant find the note with the exact details) in our company. It will never return to more than 10-15% of what it was is the intention. I had planned to cut back before the plague anyway, I realised that I still enjoyed the travel but did not want to do it as much. Then doomsday. It made me realise how much I enjoyed the social interaction (and yes, I am brave enough to admit it, there were little jolly trips that weren't 100% necessary but we disguised them very well!) with colleagues from around the world, how vital, not important, but how vital that face to face was in building your network. It allowed me to over-achieve tremendously and have fun at the same time with the old adage of "work hard, play hard". So, with that gone and not likely to return in the next 3 years, and then with plenty of jumping through hoops, I realised that the travel and the networking was all I enjoyed. Hated expense audits and dealing with chimps who could not understand that you cannot retrospectively apply a new policy to expenses from 18 months ago (oh yes we can (and did)), and said "package please, time to retire". So, I'm done with travelling for the forseeable. But it wasn't going to return to anything like the halcyon days (for me at least) within the next couple of years so that's a wrap.

You're missing one important detail - right now, virtually no one travels. Not traveling doesn't put a company into disadvantage against their competition. This may change in the future - if some companies in an same industry resume business travel and it brings them additiinal revenue, then others will have to follow to stay competitive. Whether this happens or not is not clear in my crystal ball, but I definitely wouldn't draw conclusions based on performance during the pandemic.

It depends on the industry and job description.
If your job is in sales, you probably have to start travelling again to build new personal relationships with clients.
However, a lot of business travel happened in the past, because a co-located team wants to meet in person for a workshop or because teams within a company want to meet to work on a common topic or colleagues are flown in for in-person training. I am afraid that those kinds of meetings will move to the online world.
Actually, esp. colleagues with families and small kids don't mind to stay at home and not travel.

You are right, but that is not the only group that is saying corporate travel will come back. Some of us are traveling, and as I noted above, flights are increasing. I especially notice TATL increases. I put my family on a recent AF flight from JFK to CDG, There are now two flights a day and checking the seatmaps, both flights were around 75% full. And they are adding another flight next month and there is also DL and UA on that route. That's a lot of people flying between New York and Paris. If you look, you will see the same for other euro and US cities. I think a lot of people here must be working for large corporations that move slowly and won't return to the skies for a good while. But the smaller more nimble businesses are and will continue to increase travel as they go eat the lunches of the bigger companies.

The 1-2 day long haul trips are indeed not happening much for now. To go to France I have to get a COVID test with results 72 hours before my flight. But that won't stop me from going for 10 days or more. Thankfully returning to the US there are no restrictions or tests.

People saying there is no business travel going on now have their heads in the sand I feel. This is Flyertalk. Go look at the flight schedules and see them increasing and go look at the loads. It is not true for every country, but many countries are increasing business travel quite a bit.

I don’t think anyone has said there is no business travel now nor that there won’t be in the future. But that we will not return to anything near what it was before. Some types are happening now and Some types will return, but much won’t.

Well as that is a distant future prediction, I will argue against that as I believe it will absolutely return. Humans like travel and will revert to form soon enough. As I've said before, it is like 9/11. Back then people, mostly Americans, were afraid of terrorism and did not travel. And corporate workers instantly moved to conference calls. But over time people got over the fear and went back to corporate travel and corporate tourism. People, many of them here on Flyertalk, will invent reasons to have a industry group meeting in Bali. It will happen eventually.

I broadly agree with this assessment. The only question is how soon the return will happen and whether it will be soon enough to same some of the really big players in this industry. I fear not and the 'Discontinued Programs/Partners' section on FT is doomed to grow considerably larger. In the news today VS have cut 1,150 more jobs and have finance in place for 18 months. Whether that is enough, who knows.